Sophie Coulombeau

Profile

Biography

Sophie's main expertise is in literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. She carried out postgraduate study at the University of Pennsylvania (Thouron Fellowship) and then the University of York, where her doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between naming and identity in late eighteenth-century English literature. She then spent five years as a Lecturer at Cardiff University, where she taught a range of critical and creative modules. She is the author of Reading With The Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and editor of New Perspectives on the Burney Family (Duke University Press, 2018), and has published articles and chapters in Nineteenth-Century Prose, the Huntington Library Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Life, and Historical Fiction Now. She is General Editor of the Burney Journal.

In 2019, along with colleagues from Manchester University and the University of Vigo, she was awarded a large AHRC grant for the collaborative research project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers', based at the John Rylands Library. In 2022 the team published their open access digital edition The Mary Hamilton Papers (c.1740-c.1850). This open access resource presents 3000 items of life writing (diaries, letters and manuscript books) as high-resolution images, metadata, and transcribed text with an editorial gloss. Alongside other project outputs (see 'Research'), Sophie is currently co-editing a volume of essays, Mary Hamilton and Her Circles, with Co-Investigators David Denison and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza.

Sophie is also a creative writer of prose fiction and autofiction. In 2012 she won the Arts Council England Next Great Novelist Award with her debut novel Rites (Route Publishing). She has received awards from New Writing North, the Society of Authors, and Arts Council England's Developing Your Creative Practice scheme to support her writing. Her most recent publication, a creative-critical essay about motherhood and mobility called Walking Matilda, was aired on BBC Radio 3 and featured in Writers on Walks, an audio anthology published by Penguin, in 2023.

Research

Overview

Critical

Sophie's main expertise is in literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. Her core interests are: women's writing, especially the novel; naming and identity; reading practices; cultures of collection; correspondence networks; and life-writing. In recent years, her research in these areas has addressed the talented and influential Burney family - particularly the novelist and diarist Frances Burney (1752-1840) and her brother, the critic and collector Charles Burney (1757-1817) – and their circles. Her most recent publication is Reading With the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She has published articles addressing Frances Burney's scientific sociability, Elizabeth Montagu's fictive kinship, and the personal name as unit of surveillance in the writing of William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham. She has also edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life called 'New Perspectives on the Burney Family'. Her research has been supported by competitive fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, McGill University and the John Rylands Library, among others.

Between 2019 and 2023 Sophie was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers', based at the John Rylands Library. She managed the Reading Practices strand of the project, which aimed to investigate how the Mary Hamilton archive might alter scholarly understanding of eighteenth and nineteenth century patterns of textual circulation, reception and response. She is currently preparing articles addressing (i) her findings in this area (ii) Hamilton's fraught relationship with the future George IV (iii) Hamilton's literary and sociable relations with Frances Burney. With her Co-investigators David Denison and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, she is co-editing a special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies called Mary Hamilton and Her Circles: Gender, Sociability, Manuscript. In 2022 the team published their open access digital edition The Mary Hamilton Papers (c.1740-c.1850). This open access resource presents 3000 items of life writing (diaries, letters and manuscript books) as high-resolution images, metadata, and transcribed text with an editorial gloss. Sophie also manages a public engagement programme associated with the project called '#MeToo in the Georgian Court'.

Sophie has a strong side-interest in the writing of Hilary Mantel. In 2023 her reflective creative-critical essay, 'Naming Names: Reflections on Referentiality in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy', was published in Historical Fiction Now, eds. Mark Eaton and Bruce Holsinger (Oxford University Press).

Other ongoing research projects include: a monograph entitled The Point of the Name: Onomastics, Identity, and the Novel, 1759-1817; an article called 'To Give Birth to Valuable Productions: John Trusler's Literary Society', and an essay on the death writing of Hester Thrale Piozzi.

Creative

In 2012 Sophie published her debut novel Rites, which won the Arts Council England Next Great Novelist Award and was described by Philip Pullman as "terrific". Since then, she has been working on a contemporary novel about motherhood and monstrosity set in present-day York, which has received funding from the Society of Authors and Arts Council England. She has also had several short stories published. Her most recent publication, a creative-critical essay about motherhood and mobility called Walking Matilda, was aired on BBC Radio 3 and featured in Writers on Walks, an audio anthology published by Penguin, in 2023.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Sophie currently convenes and teaches undergraduate modules on Jane Austen, The Business of Books, and Adventures in the Archive. She contributes to the MA modules Romantic Texts and Contexts and Wollstonecraft to Austen: Femininity and Literary Culture. She co-supervises critical and creative doctoral projects. She is an active member of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Writers at York group.

External activities

Overview

As a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, Sophie is passionate about communicating academic research to a wide audience and understanding how it creates change in the world. She has written, presented and guested on more than 25 programmes, features and podcasts for BBC Radio: sample topics include marital naming, children's literature, contemporary attitudes towards death, the history of the York Retreat, Georgian entertainments, and the myth of Thomas Chatterton. She has also co-devised and appeared on a six-part podcast series for The New Statesman: 'The Great Forgetting: Women Writers Before Austen'. Amongst others, she has written for BBC Arts, the Guardian, the TLS, History Today, and the Independent. She has undertaken training and assessment activity for the BBC and AHRC.

She is currently Impact Officer for the Department of English and Related Literature. In this role she supports colleagues who are interested in bringing their research to audiences, and creating change, outside academia.